The study examined the effect of government expenditures on infrastructure development in economic growth in Nigeria, explores the effect of public spending across key sectors on economic growth, with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the dependent variable. The study used four proxies for government sectoral expenditure: expenditure on agriculture (GEA), education (GEE), health (GEH), and transportation (GET). A quantitative research design was employed, covering the period from 1990 to 2023. Data were collected from secondary sources, specifically the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Statistical Bulletin and World Bank Development Indicators. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique was used for data analysis due to its suitability for small sample sizes and mixed orders of integration. The regression results show that the p-values for GEA (0.1903), GEE (0.8167), GEH (0.2825), and GET (0.4965) are all statistically insignificant on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) within the period studied. The study concluded that government expenditure in agriculture, education, health, and transportation has not yielded a statistically significant impact on Nigeria’s economic growth over the past three decades.
Oluyemi et al. (2025) studied this question.